I still dont like it but my understanding it is power for him to disconnect us from other countries that may start cyber attacks to disrupt daily business on the net. That way the internet is still useable for all of us when a country may be trying to disrupt it.

Disabling the internet now would have huge finical ramifications so they would never want to do that. They would want to shut off access to those looking to harm it. There are almost very few jobs left in our country that aren't tied some how into the internet.

I dont think its the right way to protect the internet though because its leaves us open to major abuse from the government now.

I understand what you are saying Dobly, but here is my question. IF, and there is a really really big IF involved here, the US government's infostructure was attacked to the degree that they feel it is necessary to disconnect us, what stops them from doing it all over again the moment we "reconnect"? It seems to me like a power play being used for some unknown reason...

Also I liked the fact that almost no one heard about it over the oil spill crisis in the gulf. I have been watching the news and whatnot just to see what is going on lately with the world IMO, going to hell in a hand-basket, and didn't catch one whiff of this.

I'm not quite sure HOW they can do that, outside of disconnecting specific government locations from the locations via routes. Physically disconnecting remote countries would be very tricky, and would probably cause massive outages (due to the distributed nature of the interwebs) as routes attempt to reconverge.

Example - we decide that we don't like Australia anymore, so we plunk any direct connection to them that is physically in the US. Well, Australia would be connected to Japan and other Pacific nations directly, so that traffic would just re-route to their cables, overloading them. It just doesn't make sense.

I'm going to have to ask high up our chain how we are managing this now, as this is interesting.

From what I'm reading of the bill it's physical disconnects, but not from specific countries but for specific services (like government communications), and would probably play into the buildout of new networks at some point in the future. DNS and BGP changes could help (why some of our government buildings ever had /8's announced out I'll just leave to imagination), but will not stop a full attack because of the distributed nature of attacks anymore.

The fact that most major attacks do not happen from outside organizations/countries, but from "zombie computers" taken over by malware means that the threat is much harder to handle. I worry when politicians try to understand it, because it's easily manipulated when it's put into their language.